MONDAY 7:29 AM: There’s really no more anxiety than being on a bus full of librarians who are worried about missing the award ceremony. It’s still snowing (it’s Lake effect this time), and people are a little anxious but super excited about getting down to the convention center and calling their people or hearing other […]

The ALA Youth Media Awards will be announced tomorrow morning at 8 a.m. CT in Chicago (that’s 9 a.m. for Martha and me in Boston). Here is a link to the live webcast. Watching online is not quite the same as being in that huge ballroom full of book-loving early risers, fizzing with anticipation and […]

FRIDAY, 10:45 AM: At the risk of seeming like a stalker, I have a few things to report from the Caldecott meetings in Chicago. Not really! I have nothing to report from the (closed) Caldecott meetings. But I am in Chicago, and I am at ALA. I was able to check with a friend to […]

As a child, I frequented libraries that had rather old books. I remember my elementary school library had timeworn copies of the Madeline books and that one of my neighborhood libraries had old books by Lois Lenski, older versions of the Amelia Bedelia books, and the All-of-a-Kind Family books by Sydney Taylor. New books did […]

The little-girl and feline, respectively, stars of the animated series Peg + Cat, have a series of loosely math-related, cat-stuck-in-a-tree adventures in The Tree Problem app (PBS Kids, January 2015). First choose a location: Math-tropolis, Dino Valley, The South Pole, Broadway, The Farm, or Peg’s Backyard. (If you’re indecisive, that just gives you time to hear […]

The 2015 Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction goes to Dash, by Kirby Larson, published by Scholastic Press. While Mitsi is going to miss spending time with her beloved dog Dash now that Christmas vacation is over, she is looking forward to seeing her best buds Mags and Judy. Mitsy thought the trio would always […]

This quarter in fifth grade, we’ve been reading Lois Lowry’s Number the Stars, and my students were ready and curious to learn about World War II. I’m a big fan of Number the Stars, but I noticed that during my lectures, students kept saying that the supplemental books I had given them had already taught […]

Congratulations to Marla Frazee’s spectacular The Farmer and the Clown, winner of this year’s Calling Caldecott mock vote! While the rest of you were checking the weather and worrying about travel plans and charging your cellphones, we were here checking the returns for Calling Caldecott (results below). Last year was unusual in that two books […]